Costs rising as Fort Lauderdale tries to dam its water crisis

Frame grabs from aerial footage provided by WSVN-7 of a damaged water main along the 2500 block of Northwest 55th Court, near the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport on July 18, 2019. (WSVN-7 / Courtesy)

Fort Lauderdale faces a daunting task to repair its aging water and sewer systems and replace crumbling pipes that break without warning. The costs keep rising faster than the city can get to the needed work.

Fixes to its failing water treatment plant are on hold after the lowest bid to do the work came in $15 million higher than the city had budgeted.

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A separate project to map the precise locations of all the city’s water pipes and valves will take two to three years to accomplish, but can’t begin until officials figure out where they will get the close to $6 million needed for the task.

Despite the critical condition of the drinking and wastewater systems, city commissioners still plan to divert about $10 million in utility funds this year to help pay for other city services.

Commissioners, who’ve raided the utility revenues by as much as $20 million a year since 2012, intend to eventually do away with the transfer that helps them keep the city’s property tax rate from rising, but say they’re not ready to go “cold turkey” just yet.

Residents have been demanding greater urgency with pipe repairs, especially after a July water main break cut off the water supply going to the city’s Fiveash Regional Water Treatment Plant, drying up the available water for its 220,000 water customers. Businesses throughout the city were forced to close, the state sent in truckloads of bottled water and residents endured several days of having to boil tap water they used for cooking or drinking.

City Manager Chris Lagerbloom said he’ll present commissioners with proposals for “a new and improved utility action plan” by Oct. 1.

Costs keep rising

The dollars needed will be significant given the years of neglect. A 2017 report placed the fix for the water and wastewater systems at $1.4 billion.

“We have a much bigger problem than people realize,” said Victoria Park resident Charlie King. “This is a real problem. We’re in a really deep, deep hole.”

Consultants said the Fiveash plant, which was built in 1954, needs to be renovated, at a cost of at least $124 million, or replaced, which could cost between $200 million and $280 million, to avoid an even worse water crisis.

The city has been looking to do a portion of the Fiveash repair work while it considers its long-term strategy, but officials were surprised by the proposals they received. They figured the work they requested would cost about $32 million, but the lowest bid was for $47.3 million.

Commissioners rejected the bids Tuesday. The city is now shaving down the scope of the work and will rebid the project in a few weeks, city spokesman Chaz Adams said.

“The city currently has a study underway that is evaluating the long-term options for replacing the Fiveash Water Treatment Plant. In the meantime, we are moving forward with re-bidding the improvements that need to be done to the current facility,” Adams said in an email.

Years of neglect

The city had been diverting about $20 million annually from water and sewer revenues for other city projects since 2012, and by a lesser amount of about $5 million annually for a number of years before that. Commissioners have vowed to eliminate the transfers so the money can be spent on needed utility repairs. They are gradually cutting back the amount by $5 million a year. That would eliminate the transfers in two years.

The past few years, the city has stepped up repairs with its “Go Big, Go Fast!” catch-up plan. Its focus has been primarily on the sewage system after the state threatened legal action against the city because of pollution caused by massive sewage spills from pipes rupturing.

The city reached an agreement with the state in September 2017. Broken pipes had been responsible for more than 21 million gallons of sewage pouring out on the ground and into the water over the previous three years. As part of the consent order, the city faced potential penalties for future ruptures.

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Through October 2018, the city had another 19 unauthorized sewage discharges, according to letters from the state Department Of Environmental Protection, which assessed $34,000 in fines.

Since October, the city has spilled more than 600,000 more gallons of raw sewage in 15 unauthorized discharges that are subject to $54,000 in penalties, state officials said. They include two in March from a twice-broken 44-year-old pipe that spilled about 300,000 gallons of raw sewage into the Rio Mary Rita waterway near the 2800 block of Northeast 36th Street, the state said.

A flood of problems emerges

July’s water break in a pipe carrying untreated water from the city’s well fields to the Fiveash plant showed the city’s water system problems are just as severe as its sewer issues.

While the break at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport started with human error — a Florida Power & Light subcontractor working underground bored into the pipe by accident — the problem worsened because city officials couldn’t quickly find the valves needed to divert the water around the break. Once the valves were uncovered, they didn’t work because they had not been maintained for years.

Officials told commissioners Tuesday that the maps they had were about six feet off on the location of the valves, which then required additional digging to find. No regular maintenance had been done on the valves in at least eight years because of budget cuts following the Great Recession, officials said.

“We went digging where the map said the valves were and we did not find them,” Lagerbloom said. “Those valves are underground. There is no manhole. Literally, you end up digging along the pipe until you find the valve.”

Mapping of the sewer lines is already underway because of the state action and should be completed by September 2020, Public Works Director Paul Berg said. The cost is about $3.5 million, officials said.

Mapping of the city’s water lines hasn’t begun and likely will take two to three years once the city finds the roughly $5 million to $6 million needed for the much larger project.

“At this point we’re going to need to regroup and find a way to fund the water side,” Berg said.